Soon We'll Be Reading in the Future

Increasingly, we are moving to a digital world, and while downloading information straight into our brains a la The Matrix or Johnny Mnemonic (what’s with Keanu Reeves?) is a long way off, it still gives pause to someone who grew up with the analog. In some cases, it just makes sense. You can’t play a record in a car or on the go; you can’t bring a board game with you to play on the subway; you can’t keep everything in file drawers when you have limited office space. Television, the latest to join the digital revolution, is better in a digital form than in an analog form.

Sadly, though, the trend seems to be constantly towards the impermanent. Having shelves of LPs gives physical presence and value to the music, and the act of having to take them off the shelf, place them on the record player, and flip them halfway through turns listening into a participatory experience. You have to really want it. It’s for that reason that while CD sale decline, sales of Vinyl LPs are actually increasing for the first time in years. People don’t want just convenience, they want meaning.

Luckily, one medium that has resisted the switch to digital has been the printed word. Sure, you can read newspapers online and occasionally find a book on the web (or in an audiofile), but by and large, people still consume literature in book form. The e-book has been slow to gain acceptance, and it’s because of the very nature of books. They too are a participatory experience, requiring your active looking and page turning but also the active participation of your imagination and interpretation.

An iPod allows you to place thousands of songs in one small device. Songs go by quickly, and in the course of a day you might listen to several albums worth, and it’s simply not practical to carry around your whole physical music collection with you so that you can choose your next album or song on the fly. It would also be impractical to carry around movie projector and a series of reels, or a television with VCR and collection of tapes.

Books, on the other hand, take time. If you leave the house in the morning with one book, chances are you won’t finish it by the time you get home. At most, maybe you’ll need two books. An e-reader, in order to be comfortable to hold and read, as well as to have the proper storage and power requirement, needs to be a certain size to be practical, and that size is roughly the same as a short book. So it’s not necessarily more convenient than an actual book. In addition, a book requires no additional power source. Unless you’re in a pitch black room or out at night in the woods, the natural world provides everything you need to see that book, without you having to worry about finishing the book before the battery runs out. You can pick it up and start reading without having to open a program or scroll through pages, and you can do so in any setting without disturbing others with your glowing page.

Frankly, I like books because they are so analog. I can see at a glance how much I’ve read and how much further I have to go. I can, on a whim, skip ahead or travel back for a second to check something. I don’t have to turn off my book when the plane is taking off, and I don’t have to find an outlet to plug in my book. When I was a kid, I could hide my book in my lap and read during a particularly boring health class or assembly, and no one would be the wiser because my book gave off no sound or light and could easily be hidden amongst my other school-required books.

So feel free to convert everything else I own into a digital copy that can be attached to me at all time and hold everything I own, leaving me with the fear that one day it will crash and I’ll lose it all. I’ll keep my every increasing shelves with my collection of books taking up valuable space.